Digikam Albums on Network Filesystem

Now, I was stumped when Digikam refused to work the first time, I thought it was because of the overwhelming number of photographs that I threw at it – 30GB, over network. So I reduced it to 12MB… nothing happened. That’s when I sensed that something is wrong.

The above bug report almost washed away all hopes of having my files on a central fileserver and accessing them from the various machines around me. I went to sleep at 6 am, thinking about this… woke up for lunch, and woke up with an idea – I mounted the share on a directory which is outside the path of Digikam’s library, then I symlinked the directory into the library. So now basically, the sqlite database sits on my local harddisk, but the files are accessed from the server – problem solved!

Library: /home/harshad/images/

Share mounted on: /home/harshad/shared/

Actual photos on: /home/harshad/shared/photos/2007/

Command:

ln -s /home/harshad/shared/photos/2007 /home/harshad/images/shared

I should mention that it works fine when I have the sample images amounting upto 12MB… when I gave it the whole library, it loaded the information into the database, but after showing no further progress for more than 30 minutes, I terminated it.

I think I’ll have to have various symlinks for smaller sections of my library and have shell scripts to create / delete these symlinks before loading digikam to make it lighter on the software and network!

Thank you Micron. Also read up on your solution… and thanks for linking back here.

My main issue has been the number of photos that I am trying to handle. So far only Picasa (on windows) has been able to work smoothly with 512 MB of RAM. Lightroom needs almost a gigabyte, BlueMarine can adjust, but I’m still trying to get a grip on how it works… DigiKam is by far the best for UNIX world, but the menus and popup windows for editing creep me out.

I moved my folder to a vfat partition. It was bad luck that I didn’t have any other place free to store all of these pictures.

The problem that arose was that the lower/upper case writing got somehow mangled, and furthermore these entries would exists twice in the Digikam database.

These where the commands I just to fix all of that:
# ‘move folders’, so update information
UPDATE Albums SET url = ‘/serverFotos’ || url;
# delete all upper case pictures where the same lower case version would exist
DELETE FROM Images WHERE LOWER(name) != name AND LOWER(name) IN (SELECT name FROM Images);